Short Stories by Chekhov
glaring objects. The shop windows hypnotised us; we went into ecstasies
over imitation brooches and bought a mass of useless trumpery.
The same thing happened in Rome, where it rained and there was a cold
wind. After a heavy lunch we went to look at St. Peter's, and thanks to
our replete condition and perhaps the bad weather, it made no sort of
impression on us, and detecting in each other an indifference to art, we
almost quarrelled.
The money came from my father. I went to get it, I remember, in the
morning. Lubkov went with me.
"The present cannot be full and happy when one has a past," said he. "I
have heavy burdens left on me by the past. However, if only I get the
money, it's no great matter, but if not, I'm in a fix. Would you believe
it, I have only eight francs left, yet I must send my wife a hundred and
my mother another. And we must live here too. Ariadne's like a child;
she won't enter into the position, and flings away money like a duchess.
Why did she buy a watch yesterday? And, tell me, what object is there in
our going on playing at being good children? Why, our hiding our
relations from the servants and our friends costs us from ten to fifteen
francs a day, as I have to have a separate room. What's the object of
it?"
I felt as though a sharp stone had been turned round in my chest. There
was no uncertainty now; it was all clear to me. I turned cold all over,
and at once made a resolution to give up seeing them, to run away from
them, to go home at once. . . .
"To get on terms with a woman is easy enough," Lubkov went on. "You have
only to undress her; but afterwards what a bore it is, what a silly
business!"
When I counted over the money I received he said:
"If you don't lend me a thousand francs, I am faced with complete ruin.
Your money is the only resource left to me."
I gave him the money, and he at once revived and began laughing about
his uncle, a queer fish, who could never keep his address secret from
his wife. When I reached the hotel I packed and paid my bill. I had
still to say good-bye to Ariadne.
I knocked at the door.
"Entrez!"
In her room was the usual morning disorder: tea-things on the table, an
unfinished roll, an eggshell; a strong overpowering reek of scent. The
bed had not been made, and it was evident that two had slept in it.
Ariadne herself had only just got out of bed and was now with her hair
down in a flannel dressing-jacket.
I said good-morning to her, and then sat in silence for a minute while
she tried to put her hair tidy, and then I asked her, trembling all
over:
"Why . . . why . . . did you send for me here?"
Evidently she guessed what I was thinking; she took me by the hand and
said:
"I want you to be here, you are so pure."
I felt ashamed of my emotion, of my trembling. And I was afraid I might
begin sobbing, too! I went out without saying another word, and within
an hour I was sitting in the train. All the journey, for some reason, I
imagined Ariadne with child, and she seemed disgusting to me, and all
the women I saw in the trains and at the stations looked to me, for some
reason, as if they too were with child, and they too seemed disgusting
and pitiable. I was in the position of a greedy, passionate miser who
should suddenly discover that all his gold coins were false. The pure,
gracious images which my imagination, warmed by love, had cherished for
so long, my plans, my hopes, my memories, my ideas of love and of woman-
-all now were jeering and putting out their tongues at me. "Ariadne," I
kept asking with horror, "that young, intellectual, extraordinarily
beautiful girl, the daughter of a senator, carrying on an intrigue with
such an ordinary, uninteresting vulgarian? But why should she not love
Lubkov?" I answered myself. "In what is he inferior to me? Oh, let her
love any one she likes, but why lie to me? But why is she bound to be
open with me?" And so I went on over and over again till I was
stupefied.
It was cold in the train; I was travelling first class, but even so
there were three on a side, there were no double windows, the outer door
opened straight into the compartment, and I felt as though I were in the
stocks, cramped, abandoned, pitiful, and my legs were fearfully numb,
and at the same time I kept recalling how fascinating she had been that
morning in her dressing-jacket and with her hair down, and I was
suddenly overcome by such acute jealousy that I leapt up in anguish, so
that my neighbours stared at me in wonder and positive alarm.
At home I found deep snow and twenty degrees of frost. I'm fond of the
winter; I'm fond of it because at that time, even in the hardest frosts,
it's particularly snug at home. It's pleasant to put on one's fur jacket
and felt overboots on a clear frosty day, to do something in the garden
or in the yard, or to read in a well warmed room, to sit in my father's
study before the open fire, to wash in my country bath-house. . . . Only
if there is no mother in the house, no sister and no children, it is
somehow dreary on winter evenings, and they seem extraordinarily long
and quiet. And the warmer and snugger it is, the more acutely is this
lack felt. In the winter when I came back from abroad, the evenings were
endlessly long, I was intensely depressed, so depressed that I could not
even read; in the daytime I was coming and going, clearing away the snow
in the garden or feeding the chickens and the calves, but in the evening
it was all up with me.
I had never cared for visitors before, but now I was glad of them, for I
knew there was sure to be talk of Ariadne. Kotlovitch, the spiritualist,
used often to come to talk about his sister, and sometimes he brought
with him his friend Prince Maktuev, who was as much in love with Ariadne
as I was. To sit in Ariadne's room, to finger the keys of her piano, to
look at her music was a necessity for the prince--he could not live
without it; and the spirit of his grandfather Ilarion was still
predicting that sooner or later she would be his wife. The prince
usually stayed a long time with us, from lunch to midnight, saying
nothing all the time; in silence he would drink two or three bottles of
beer, and from time to time, to show that he too was taking part in the
conversation, he would laugh an abrupt, melancholy, foolish laugh.
Before going home he would always take me aside and ask me in an
undertone: "When did you see Ariadne Grigoryevna last? Was she quite
well? I suppose she's not tired of being out there?"
Spring came on. There was the harrowing to do and then the sowing of
spring corn and clover. I was sad, but there was the feeling of spring.
One longed to accept the inevitable. Working in the fields and listening
to the larks, I asked myself: "Couldn't I have done with this question
of personal happiness once and for all? Couldn't I lay aside my fancy
and marry a simple peasant girl?"
Suddenly when we were at our very busiest, I got a letter with the
Italian stamp, and the clover and the beehives and the calves and the
peasant girl all floated away like smoke. This time Ariadne wrote that
she was profoundly, infinitely unhappy. She reproached me for not
holding out a helping hand to her, for looking down upon her from the
heights of my virtue and deserting her at the moment of danger. All this
was written in a large, nervous handwriting with blots and smudges, and
it was evident that she wrote in haste and distress. In conclusion she
besought me to come and save her. Again my anchor was hauled up and I
was carried away. Ariadne was in Rome. I arrived late in the evening,
and when she saw me, she sobbed and threw herself on my neck. She had
not changed at all that winter, and was just as young and charming. We
had supper together and afterwards drove about Rome until dawn, and all
the time she kept telling me about her doings. I asked where Lubkov was.
"Don't remind me of that creature!" she cried. "He is loathsome and
disgusting to me!"
"But I thought you loved him," I said.
"Never," she said. "At first he struck me as original and aroused my
pity, that was all. He is insolent and takes a woman by storm. And
that's attractive. But we won't talk about him. That is a melancholy
page in my life. He has gone to Russia to get money. Serve him right! I
told him not to dare to come back."
She was living then, not at an hotel, but in a private lodging of two
rooms which she had decorated in her own taste, frigidly and
luxuriously.
After Lubkov had gone away she had borrowed from her acquaintances about
five thousand francs, and my arrival certainly was the one salvation for
her.
I had reckoned on taking her back to the country, but I did not succeed
in that. She was homesick for her native place, but her recollections of
the poverty she had been through there, of privations, of the rusty roof
on her brother's house, roused a shudder of disgust, and when I
suggested going home to her, she squeezed my hands convulsively and
said:
"No, no, I shall die of boredom there!"
Then my love entered upon its final phase.
"Be the darling that you used to be; love me a little," said Ariadne,
bending over to me. "You're sulky and prudent, you're afraid to yield to
impulse, and keep thinking of consequences, and that's dull. Come, I beg
you, I beseech you, be nice to me! . . . My pure one, my holy one, my
dear one, I love you so!"
I became her lover. For a month anyway I was like a madman, conscious of
nothing but rapture. To hold in one's arms a young and lovely body, with
bliss to feel her warmth every time one waked up from sleep, and to
remember that she was there--she, my Ariadne!-- oh, it was not easy to
get used to that! But yet I did get used to it, and by degrees became
capable of reflecting on my new position. First of all, I realised, as
before, that Ariadne did not love me. But she wanted to be really in
love, she was afraid of solitude, and, above all, I was healthy, young,
vigorous; she was sensual, like all cold people, as a rule--and we both
made a show of being united by a passionate, mutual love. Afterwards I
realised something else, too.
We stayed in Rome, in Naples, in Florence; we went to Paris, but there
we thought it cold and went back to Italy. We introduced ourselves
everywhere as husband and wife, wealthy landowners. People readily made
our acquaintance and Ariadne had great social success everywhere. As she
took lessons in painting, she was called an artist, and only imagine,
that quite suited her, though she had not the slightest trace of talent.
She would sleep every day till two or three o'clock; she had her coffee
and lunch in bed. At dinner she would eat soup, lobster, fish, meat,
asparagus, game, and after she had gone to bed I used to bring up
something, for instance roast beef, and she would eat it with a
melancholy, careworn expression, and if she waked in the night she would
eat apples and oranges.
The chief, so to say fundamental, characteristic of the woman was an
amazing duplicity. She was continually deceitful every minute,
apparently apart from any necessity, as it were by instinct, by an
impulse such as makes the sparrow chirrup and the cockroach waggle its
antennæ. She was deceitful with me, with the footman, with the porter,
with the tradesmen in the shops, with her acquaintances; not one
conversation, not one meeting, took place without affectation and
pretence. A man had only to come into our room--whoever it might be, a
waiter, or a baron--for her eyes, her expression, her voice to change,
even the contour of her figure was transformed. At the very first glance
at her then, you would have said there were no more wealthy and
fashionable people in Italy than we. She never met an artist or a